“It’s hard not to feel a little bit envious of Erin Gleeson. The bestselling cookbook author spent three months traveling with her family through France, Portugal, Spain and Italy to research The Forest Feast Mediterranean: Simple Vegetarian Recipes Inspired by My Travels. It’s as gorgeous as her previous books, awash in watercolor illustrations and bright vegetarian dishes that leap off the page into your sunniest kitchen dreams. Images of Gleeson and her family star alongside scenic shots from the region that inspired this book, but of course the real heroes are its 100 recipes, which include mouthwatering salads, decadent pastas and small shareables like caponata, a burrata bar, bruschetta, tartines, tartlets, tortilla espanola and pintxos, which are appetizers on long toothpicks, unique to the Barcelona bar scene. Best of all, there’s a travel guide in the back in case you’re hungry to follow in Gleeson’s picturesque footsteps—and you will be.”

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“We go 350-odd years further back in time for Robert Harris’ thriller The Second Sleep—to 1468, to be precise. Consider other terrific medieval mysteries as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Ross King’s Ex-Libris, and get ready for an exceptionally intricate tale that will take you in unexpected directions and then pummel you when you get there. Cleric Christopher Fairfax is called upon to officiate at the interment of a parish priest. It’s a simple enough task: Write a few words of banal praise and read the appropriate scriptures to usher the man to his final resting place. But Fairfax doesn’t sleep well the night before and instead visits the dead man’s library, where he happens upon all manner of heretical books that have been banned by church and state alike. Contrary to his upbringing, training and better judgment, Fairfax begins to read. At this point in the review, I am torn between revealing any more or just letting the reader unearth surprise after surprise until they begin to get a glimmering of what is really transpiring here. So, after some consideration, I will just leave you with this quote: “the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy, an apple with a bite taken out of it.” Chew on that for a while . . .”

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“Like many Europeans who lived through World War II, Françoise Frenkel led an eventful life. A Polish Jewish woman born in 1889, she studied literature in Paris. In 1921, she opened a French bookstore in Berlin. She returned to Paris in 1939, fleeing the Nazis. She made several attempts to escape to Switzerland and eventually succeeded. But if Frenkel hadn’t written a memoir, she would likely be completely unknown. Rien où poser sa tête (No Place to Lay One’s Head) was published in Switzerland in 1945, sold a few copies and quickly sank into collective forgetfulness. Then a copy was found in 2010 at a sale for a French charity, and it’s now republished as A Bookshop in Berlin.

It’s interesting the way a title can affect a reader’s perception of a book. The title No Place to Lay One’s Head draws attention to Frenkel’s personal hardships, to the terror and cruelty she encountered. There is plenty of suspense as Frenkel describes her brushes with disaster—but the title A Bookshop in Berlin instead emphasizes her improbable bookstore, illuminating a deeper truth about Frenkel’s experiences.

Like a bookstore, Frenkel’s memoir contains not one story but many. There is, of course, her own odyssey to safety—but there’s also the heroic tale of M. and Mme. Marius, Frenkel’s friends and saviors; the comedy of the glamorous refugee who hoodwinked the Germans into saving her son; the tragedy of the young man accused of murdering his wife; the melodrama of hardened prison guards; and ultimately, a story of liberation and redemption.”

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